When TeX met Perl: two crazy languages and their sane marriage

TeX is a typesetting system designed to produce high-quality books. During its 25 years of life the usage grew much beyond the original purpose.

TeX is a macro- and token-based language, with both components changeable on the fly, meaning that "only TeX can parse TeX". This (mis)feature is also inbuilt in Perl, suggesting a nice match of the two languages, each of which supplying what is lacking in the other.

No TeX knowledge is required to understand this talk. The speaker is also far from being an expert, and yet he uses the Perl+TeX combo for fun and profit.